Stuck Inside of Boca with the Mittens Blues Again

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(Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)

It's hard not to think of them all now as figures in an Edward Hopper painting, staring at something on the counter two feet beyond their battered, folded hands. They are the people who had made their peace with the inevitability of Willard Romney. And now it's 2 a.m. and the joints are closed and all they've got left are the grand plans that make sense only to each other while they all pool their pennies for another cup o'joe.

There's the lady in the wool hat, the one that occasionally breaks into an old hymn spontaneously. She's got the path that leads upward back onto that glory road. First, though, here's an entertaining voice from her head....

I wrote recently of an imagined rural Ohio woman sitting on her porch, watching the campaign go by. She's 60, she identifies as conservative, she likes guns, she thinks the culture has gone crazy. She doesn't like Obama. Romney looks OK. She's worried about the national debt and what it will mean to her children. But she's having a hard time, things are tight for her right now, she's on partial disability, and her husband is a vet and he gets help, and her mother receives Social Security. She's worked hard and paid into the system for years. Her husband fought for his country. And she's watching this whole election and thinking.You can win her vote if you give her faith in your fairness and wisdom. But not if you label her and dismiss her.

Gun-Totin' Grammy wants fairness and wisdom. STAND AND DELIVER, PUNK! But, then, of course, she comes to the real game-changer as the counterman looks at the other customers and makes circular motions with his index finger just east of his temple....

Wake this election up. Wade into the crowd, wade into the fray, hold a hell of a rally in an American city-don't they count anymore? A big, dense city with skyscrapers like canyons, crowds and placards, and yelling. All of our campaigning now is in bland suburbs and tired hustings. How about: New York, New York, the city so nice they named it twice? You say the state's not in play? It's New York. Our media lives here, they'll make it big. How about downtown Brooklyn, full of new Americans? Guys-make it look like there's an election going on. Because there is.

Yeah, that's the ticket. Willard Does Flatbush! I'd buy a ticket just to watch him buy an egg-cream and ask for decaf. And those "new Americans," who, undoubtedly will turn out en masse to listen to the world's most boring Caucasian? Not so much, I'm thinking.

Then there's the kid who works in local TV, who comes bubbling in every night to talk tough while the old rewrite man in the booth sighs and pulls the flask out of his pocket to freshen up his coffee....

Team Romney should force this debate onto the national stage. They should not walk it back.The American people are with him. It is the perfect time to remind people that Barack Obama, who authored Obamacare, wants to now be the arbiter of people's fair share. To Obama, fair share means you fork over your money so others can have a life of government dependency. Romney's point about government dependency ties perfectly to the dreadful economic news of late and is a perfect pivot back to that.

Of course, the old rewrite man knows, kid'll be back in no time, hungover as hell, and he'll try to explain what he said the day before....

"He was off the cuff. He was at a closed-door meeting. He didn't think he was on the record. Even at his press conference later he said he wasn't very articulate. He's going to have to explain that. Even conservatives like me who don't think this is as damaging as a lot of people say, have to concede the remark was really inarticulate at best and really dumb."

The problem here, of course, is that when one speaks "off the cuff," one is more likely to be honest that one is likely to be when one if prattling through what some speechwriter concocted to fool the rubes. For example, when one calls a Supreme Court justice a "goat-fucking child molester," one is more likely to be showing one's true self than when one is following the instructions of some CNN design consultant.

Oh, it's a hard night, and the wind's blowing the rain flat out and horizontal. Somebody drop the sax player a fin so he'll play some more.